The following is an excerpt from Art of the State: Celebrating the Visual Art of North Carolina by Liza Roberts with a foreword by Lawrence J. Wheeler and photographs by Lissa Gotwals, which is on sale today and available wherever books are sold. What is North Carolina art? Is it the pottery made famous by artists like Ben Owen III, whose… Continue Reading What is North Carolina Art?
Happy publication day to Glenda Gilmore’s Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination, a Ferris and Ferris Book. Romare Bearden (1911–1988), one of the most prolific, original, and acclaimed American artists of the twentieth century, richly depicted scenes and figures rooted in the American South and the Black experience. Bearden hailed from North Carolina but was forced to relocate to the… Continue Reading Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination
The last of Spring 2022’s UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC Press’s ongoing Off the Shelf speaker series featured Glenda Gilmore discussing her new book, Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination: An Artist’s Reckoning with the South (on sale May 10, 2022). Watch the archived virtual discussion between Gilmore and Aaron Smithers, UNC-Chapel Hill Special Collections R&IS Librarian: In Romare… Continue Reading Glenda Gilmore Discusses “Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination”
Happy Women’s History Month! In celebration of this historical month, we’ll be sharing reading lists curated by our staff featuring all authors who identify as women. Today we’re sharing a list from Cate Hodorowicz, one of our newly promoted Editors. Click here to see the previously shared lists and learn more about how Women’s History Month came about. If you’re interested in purchasing any… Continue Reading Women’s History Month 2022 Reading List (Curated by Cate Hodorowicz)
Today we welcome a guest post from Amanda Brickell Bellows, author of American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination, out now from UNC Press. The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the… Continue Reading Amanda Brickell Bellows–Slavery: Past and Present
Today we welcome a guest post from Thomas J. Brown, author of Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America, out now from UNC Press. This sweeping new assessment of Civil War monuments unveiled in the United States between the 1860s and 1930s argues that they were pivotal to a national embrace of military values. Americans’ wariness of standing armies… Continue Reading Thomas J. Brown: Rumors of War in Richmond
In this Q&A, UNC Press Publicity Director Gina Mahalek talks with Jean Anderson, James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame member and author of Kiln to Kitchen: Favorite Recipes from Beloved North Carolina Potters, about her lifelong passion for pottery, her earliest influences, and her gift for harmonizing text and design. Jean Anderson’s new cookbook deliciously brings together two of her… Continue Reading Author Interview: Jean Anderson on Kiln to Kitchen
Today we welcome a guest post from Alex Dika Seggerman, author of Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt Between the Islamic and the Contemporary, out now from UNC Press. Analyzing the modernist art movement that arose in Cairo and Alexandria from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s, Alex Dika Seggerman reveals how the visual arts were part of… Continue Reading Alex Dika Seggerman: A New Modernism for a New America
In Memoriam: Dick Jenrette (1929-2018) On Sunday, April 22nd, UNC Press lost a dear friend with the death of Dick Jenrette. In honor of the Press and his passion, Dick endowed the Richard Hampton Jenrette Series in Architecture and the Decorative Arts during the Press’s 75th anniversary campaign in the mid-1990s, supporting works on American architecture, material culture, and craftsmanship. … Continue Reading Joanna Ruth Marsland: In Memoriam: Dick Jenrette (1929-2018)
I remember with fondness, as do many of us who came of age in the 1990s, my neon pink and purple “caboodle.” For those of you unfamiliar with the form, it is a molded plastic container with a latched top that raises up to reveal a multitude of trays, containers, and mysteriously shaped indentations all intended to house cosmetics, hair products, and personal accessories. For my teenage self the caboodle was the ultimate symbol of femininity and the mysterious physical manipulations of skin and hair that being an adult woman required. My caboodle is long since gone, but I suspect its lingering memory shaped my interest in eighteenth-century cosmetics and the dressing furniture that housed them. Continue Reading Jennifer Van Horn: The Deceptive Caboodle
Ashley Cooper’s Grand Model was the ultimate product of English colonial policy, political philosophy, and city planning prior to the Enlightenment. The Fundamental Constitutions and “instructions,” products of both Ashley Cooper and Locke, formed a body of law and policy written by two of the most astute minds of the time, tempered to be sure by the diverse opinions of the remaining seven Carolina proprietors. Within those documents, city planning (in the broad sense of the term used throughout) held an essential place in the overall design of the colony’s social structure, economy, and government. Continue Reading Excerpt: The Ashley Cooper Plan, by Thomas D. Wilson
In the following video, Rizvi talks with Marilyn Wilkes about The Transnational Mosque in an episode of The MacMillan Report, produced by the MacMillan Center at Yale University. Continue Reading Video: Kishwar Rizvi on Islamic Architecture and Historical Memory
Last summer, to celebrate finishing the manuscript of my book, Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness, I went to New York to see artist Kara Walker’s installation A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby in an old Domino sugar factory in Brooklyn. Walker is known for making bold art that calls on viewers to consider histories of racial violence in the United States, and A Subtlety did just that. Sugar, Walker points out, is historically tied to race in many and multiple ways. Continue Reading April Merleaux: The Subtlety of the Sugar Babies
For most black artisans in the antebellum South, being born into slavery placed clear limits on their future. No matter how skilled they might be, seldom could enslaved artisans expect to trace the customary path from apprentice to master that white artisans pursued. For Montford, as for a remarkable number of his fellows in New Bern, however, the timing and circumstances of his birth together with his skills, industry, ambition, and relationships enabled him to realize such hopes as he moved from slavery to freedom and became a master of apprentices and slaves, a property owner, and a voting citizen. Only as Montford’s life drew to its close in the 1830s did he and his fellow artisans of color witness the onset of oppressive racial laws that chilled the hopes of New Bern’s black craftsmen for themselves and for their children. Continue Reading Excerpt: Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770-1900, by Catherine W. Bishir
This work can truly be called a paradigm shift for how we should see and understand a significant regional development of American architecture. Continue Reading The Chesapeake House honored by Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians
Milan Lewis of Atlantic said that he had joined the Navy during the Second World War. “I didn’t go in because I was patriotic,” he said. “I went in because I was digging clams for 40 cents a bushel, and I thought the Navy would be better, which was a mistake. The clamming was better.” Continue Reading Lawrence S. Earley: The Stories I Heard
Even with all the criteria Farrell needed to meet, the final product is wonderfully authentic. Farrell explained, “The children look natural and unposed because I spent far more time on the little game we played than on the photography. The photography was incidental, and I think that only a few times were the children aware of the camera.” Continue Reading Tobe: Charles Anderson Farrell Photographs Digitized in New Collection
My grandfather loved to tell me the long, frightening story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. When he finished telling the tale, I would ask him, “Grandad, tell it again.” And he would patiently tell me the story again. No memory from my childhood burns brighter than this story and its telling by my grandfather. Continue Reading William Ferris: A Little Bit of Story in Everything
Much like Marshall and Leimenstoll’s book, Dubrow describes the Smithsonian’s exhibit as, “doubly intriguing—combining his startlingly unique cabinets, bureaus, chairs, even a child’s Gothic-Classical style ‘commode’ (potty), architectural designs, with his extraordinary career.” Continue Reading Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery Hosts Thomas Day Exhibit
Kwilecki developed his visual ideas in series of photographs of high school proms, prison hog killings, shade-tree tobacco farming, factory work, church life, the courthouse. Continue Reading Video and Event Celebrate Paul Kwilecki’s “One Place”
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